Alex Haley Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.”
-- Alex HaleySource : "Traits of a Healthy Family" by Dolores Curran, (p. 199), 1985.
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“I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true.”
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“Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.”
-- Alex HaleySource : Reader's Digest, 1987.
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“It's always intrigued me that amidst the group called slaves there were individuals who were extremely able, who were extremely colorful, who were powerful personalities, who by no means fit the usual images of slaves. They were people who, through their personalities and abilities, were very respected in the community where they lived by both black and white.”
-- Alex Haley -
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“Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.”
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“There was a great deal of inbreeding between the Indians and the slaves. Genetically speaking, black people are some part black, some part European.”
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“In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.”
-- Alex HaleySource : Alex Haley (2007). “Alex Haley: The Man Who Traced America's Roots”, Reader's Digest Association
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“When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.”
-- Alex HaleySource : "Race: Haley's Rx: Talk, Write, Reunite" in TIME magazine, February 14, 1977.
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“Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.”
-- Alex HaleySource : "A Touch of Class" by Carol Vanderheyden, (p. 60), 2003.
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“You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life.”
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“I wasn't going to be one of those people who died wondering what if? I would keep putting my dreams to the test - even though it meant living with uncertainty and fear of failure. This is the shadowland of hope, and anyone with a dream must learn to live there.”
-- Alex Haley -
“Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.”
-- Alex HaleySource : "My Soul Looks Back, 'Less I Forget : A Collection of Quotations". Book by Dorothy Winbush Riley, 1993.
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“When you clench your fist, no one can put anything in your hand.”
-- Alex HaleySource : Alex Haley (2016). “Roots: The Saga of an American Family”, p.327, Da Capo Press
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“I think one of the most fascinating things you can do after you learn about your own people is to study something about the history and culture of other people.”
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“In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.”
-- Alex HaleySource : "A Kwanzaa Celebration" by Angela Shelf Medearis, (p. 154), 1995.
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“Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.”
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“Every death is like the burning of a library.”
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“Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.”
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“The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle.”
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“In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage- to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.”
-- Alex Haley -
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“Never completely encircle your enemy. Leave him some escape, for he will fight even more desperately if trapped.”
-- Alex HaleySource : Alex Haley (2016). “Roots: The Saga of an American Family”, p.130, Da Capo Press
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“It's an hour during the week where you can just slow down.”
-- Alex Haley -
“Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.”
-- Alex Haley -
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“I acknowledge immense debt to the griots [tribal poets] of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.”
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“Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there's a big difference between being a writer and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. You've got to want to write, I say to them, not want to be a writer. The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did.”
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“You can never enslave somebody who knows who he is.”
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“You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you. It's a small service, and there's a lot of esprit de corps.”
-- Alex Haley -
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“I suppose that it was inevitable that my word-base broadened. I could now for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of my books with a wedge...Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.”
-- Alex Haley
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